Electric vehicles are very much flavour of the month with Government. Chancellor Alistair Darling in this week’s Pre-Budget Report has announced that from April next year he is giving company car drivers who opt for the electric option a five-year break from benefit-in-kind.
Coming hot on the heels of the incentive in April of up to £5000 off a new electric car from 2011/12, this is good news for environmentally-minded company car drivers, who still currently have to pay 9% BIK on their electric cars.
Even van drivers are being given a five-year holiday for going electric plus a 100% writing down allowance for the first year.
In some ways, I see electric van sales possibly becoming more popular initially pro-rata than electric car sales as local delivery drivers opt for the cheaper, greener electric van route.
Earlier in the year, RAC Foundation research indicated a fifth of the UK’s 34 million drivers would consider or were planning to buy an electric car within the next five years.
However, lacking a proper re-charging network infrastructure, the Government acknowledged that electric vehicles would not be available as mass-market alternatives until 2017 at the earliest.
The PBR announcements would indicate Government wants to jump-start the switchover.
Widespread adoption of electric vehicles will definitely depend on a viable public re-charging point infrastructure but Government may be hoping the incentives to individuals and companies will hasten its creation at a practical level.
We’ve had the Energy Technologies Institute announce a number of UK major cities are to gain charging points for electric and hybrid fuelled vehicles under an £11m development plan, which will see a Joined-Cities Plan initially set up charging points in a nine UK cities including 25,000 in London by 2015. And then, this November, we heard about the Plugged-In Places initiative which will fund charging points in streets, car parks, commercial, retail and leisure facilities to the tune of £30m in three to six UK regions as a precursor to a nationwide roll-out.
Whether joined up, plugged in or plain fully-charged, the switch to electric transportation is slowly gaining momentum, a bit like when you depress the accelerator on an electric vehicle.
